Old Crow Part 49

In a day or two Raven had convinced himself that d.i.c.k, firm-lipped, self-controlled, as if he had set himself a task, did not mean to leave him. Raven, half amused, half touched, accommodated his behavior to their closer relation and waited for d.i.c.k to disclose himself. He would have been light-heartedly glad of the boy's company if he had found no strangeness in it, no purpose he could not, from point to point, divine.

d.i.c.k sent for more clothes, and a case came by post. He wrote in his chamber, for an hour or two every morning, and after that, Raven became conscious that the boy was keeping a watchful eye on him. If Raven went up to the hut, d.i.c.k was sure to appear there, in ten minutes at the most. Once, after a heavy snow, Raven had the wood road broken out, and d.i.c.k looked on in a darkling conjecture. And when Raven, now even to Jerry's wonder, proceeded to break from the hut to the back road, d.i.c.k found it not only impossible to restrain himself but wise to speak. They were standing by the hearth in the hut, after Raven had swept it and laid a careful fire. He had worked with all possible haste, for he never was there now without wondering whether she might come. He had been resting in the certainty of Tenney's crippled state, but the wounded foot, he knew, was bettering every day, and with it Tira's security lessened. Jerry's dismissal from the ch.o.r.es had troubled him so much that he had gone up, immediately after, to reason with Tenney. But Tenney was entering the barn door at the moment of his turning into the yard, and Tira, following, stopped an instant and made Raven a little gesture that seemed to him one of hasty dismissal, and he went back home again.

"Jack," said d.i.c.k, this morning in the hut--it was as if he had to speak--"what are you getting this place ready for, and breaking out the back road? You don't need to come up here, in weather like this. If you do, you've got your snowshoes. What the deuce are you breaking out for?"

Raven stood a moment looking down at Tira's fire. It seemed a sacred pile, consecrated to holy use. What would d.i.c.k say if he told him the paths had been broken for a woman's flying feet, the fire was laid to warm her when she came here hunted by man's cruelty? d.i.c.k was said to have written some very strong verse, but how if he found himself up against life itself?

"It's a jolly old place," Raven said, rousing himself out of his musing.

"As for breaking out, that's what oxen are for."

d.i.c.k was looking at him in a manifest concern. It was true affection.

The boy might find it difficult to hail him across the interval of years between them, but he did love old Jack, though with the precise measure of patronage due the old.

"You know," said d.i.c.k, "it worries me like the deuce to see you coming up here like----"

He paused as if the matter were too complex to be gone into lightly.

"Like what?" Raven asked him.

"Well, we've been over that. You know who built this. You know what he did in it. He brought an old rip up here to live with him, and--oh, confound it, Jack! don't pretend you don't even remember old Crow."

"Yes," said Raven gravely, "I remember Old Crow."

"Well, anyhow," said d.i.c.k, "he was a family disgrace, and the less said about him the better."

"I showed you, the night you came," said Raven, "the story of Old Crow's life. You didn't quite catch on. Want another try at it?"

d.i.c.k had to search his memory. The only thing he had kept in mind about that night was his anger against Nan. There was a book, he recalled vaguely: some sort of stuff in a crabbed hand.

"Old Crow?" he said. "Old Crow never wrote anything."

"You think," said Raven, "he brought his b.u.m up here and they sat and guzzled. Well, you're wrong, my son. Come, let's go down, and though I don't know whether it'll mean anything to you, you shall have another hack at Old Crow."

He was not easy until he had turned the key on the safety of the hut and started down the hill. When they had rounded the curve made by the three jutting firs, he stopped.

"Go on," he said. "I'll overtake you."

He ran back and slipped the key under the stone. It was a part of her security to keep the secret from d.i.c.k also.

No more was said of Old Crow that day, but, in the early evening, when they were before the fire, Raven brought down the book, always in the drawer of the little table by his bed. It was, in an undefined way, kindliness and company, always reminding him that, whatever his undesirable status now, he had been "the boy," and this was his own personal message from Old Crow.

"There you are," he said. He laid it on the table. "Don't read it unless you'd really rather. It's meant a good deal to me. Maybe it won't to you. I don't know much about the processes of your mind. You may feel at home in this particular world. I never do. Old Crow didn't either. But you'll see."

d.i.c.k began to read and, since Nan was not by to be loved and hated, with an intent mind. Once or twice he turned back, Raven saw, to ponder some pa.s.sage again. It was slow reading. He had not the pa.s.sionate haste of one who has thirsted for some such community of a.s.surance, and flies over the ground, plucking a leaf here and there, meaning to return. When he had finished he closed the book, laid it on the table, and pushed it aside as if he had definitely done with it.

"Jackie," said he, "I'm mighty glad you showed me this."

"Good!" said Raven. "Got inside it, have you?"

"Why, yes," said d.i.c.k, with a.s.surance. "That's easy enough. It isn't new, you know. And it isn't so much my getting inside that as getting inside Old Crow."

"Oh!" said Raven mildly, "so you got inside Old Crow. Now what did you find there?"

"I don't know," said d.i.c.k, "whether you'd better be told. From a psychopathic point of view, that is. But I rather guess you ought."

"d.i.c.k," said Raven, "in the name of all the G.o.ds you worship, what shouldn't I be told? And exactly how do you see us two living along here, mild as milk? What's our relation? Sometimes, when I find you plodding after me, I feel as if you were my trainer. Sometimes I have a suspicion I really am off my nut and you're my keeper. Out with it, boy?

How do you see it? Come!"

d.i.c.k, from a patent embarra.s.sment, was staring down at the hearth, and now he looked quickly up in a frankness truly engaging.

"Jack," he said, "you needn't think you're going to be left here alone, to work things out by yourself. There's no danger of mother. I told her to keep off. She only irritates you. But she hasn't gone back home.

She's right there in Boston, waiting to come."

Raven got up and walked back and forth through the room. Then he returned to his chair.

"d.i.c.k," he said conversationally, "if you were as young in years as you are in your mind, I'd mellow you."

d.i.c.k generously ignored this. He had the impeccable good nature of the sane set in authority over the sick.

"What I think, is," he said, with a soothing intonation Raven despairingly recognized as the note of strength pitting itself against weakness, "we can work it out together, you and I. We can do it better than anybody else. I suppose if I went back you'd send for Nan. But that won't do, Jack. You'll see it for yourself, when you're all right again.

Now what I mean about Old Crow is, that his complexes are like yours--or rather yours are like his. Don't you see what an influence he's had on you? More than Miss Anne even."

"Hold up," said Raven. "I'm being mighty patient with you, but certain things, you know, you don't say."

"You used to go up there and see him," said d.i.c.k, willingly relinquishing Miss Anne. There were times when, as he remembered from boyhood, old Jack was dangerous. "Some of the things about him shocked you. Some appealed to you. Pity, too: you must have pitied him tremendously. You probably knew about his craze over this girl he mentions here. You may have heard things about her, just as he did.

Jack, I can see--the whole thing has come to me in the last ten minutes--Old Crow has been the big influence in your life. Everything else has come from that. And then the war knocked you out and you got _cafard_ and the whole blasted business blew up and came to the surface and--there you are."

"Yes," said Raven, "here we are."

He leaned back in his chair and laughed until he could have cried. Never had he found anything funnier than the boy's honest face and his honest voice pouring forth undigested sc.r.a.ps from haphazard gleanings.

"d.i.c.k," he said, "you're a dear fellow. But you're an awful a.s.s. The trouble is with you, old man, you've no imagination. It was left out.

You're too much like your mother and it'll be the death of you as it is of her if you don't stop being intelligent. That sort of popular science stuff, you know. Be a little sloppy, boy. Come off your high horse."

d.i.c.k was still una.s.sailably good-natured. Raven was his job, and he could hold himself down with a steady hand.

"Now," said Raven, "for heaven's sake sc.r.a.p your complexes, even if you sc.r.a.p Old Crow with 'em, and let's see if we can't be moderately peaceable. That is, if we've got to be marooned here together."

And by dint of giving his mind to it, he was himself peaceable and even amusing, but as the dark came on he found he had much ado to keep up the game; he was too sensitively awake to Tira. With no new reason for it, he was plainly worried, and, leaving d.i.c.k reading by the fire, went up to his own room. He sat down by a front window, facing the dark wall of the hill, but when, after another hour, he heard d.i.c.k come up and shut himself in, he slipped down the stairs, took his cap and went off to the hut. The sky was dark, but clear, and the stars burned in galaxies of wonder. But the beauty of the night only excited and oppressed him until he could a.s.sure himself she was not out in it on one of her dreadful flights. If he found her in the hut, he could go home to bed. He reached the door, stopped, and put his hand under the stone. The key was there, and he laughed out in his thankfulness. The laugh was at his fears, and he wondered whether he would rather think of her there in her prison or here, still under sentence, due at her prison again. Then he heard a step: a man's crashing on regardless of underbrush. Was it Tenney?

Should he hear that voice as he had before in its wild "Hullo"?

"Where are you?" came the voice. "Where are you, old man?"

d.i.c.k had followed him and was, in his affectionate solicitude, warning him against surprise. Raven ran down to meet him, and by the turn of the fir trees they faced each other.

"d.i.c.k," said Raven, "what are you up here for?"

"Can't help it, old man," said d.i.c.k. The eagerness of his voice made it very moving. "Really, you know, I can't have you trotting round, this time of night, all by your lonesome. If you want to hang round here, you let me come, too. We'll light the fire and smoke a pipe and finish the night, if you say so. Come, old man. Come on."